Under the current “Global Village” trends, large corporations are distributed all over the world and have several sites, campuses, or zones situated in different states, countries, or continents. Companies and organizations are increasingly encouraging the use of audio/video conferencing as well as multipoint conferencing to improve communication and efficiency within the company. Therefore, large companies invest large sum of money to establish private communication networks in each site and between sites of the corporations. The communication networks include packet-based networks and/or circuit switch networks.
To establish the private communication networks, large companies distribute a large number of multimedia endpoints throughout the company. Usually, one or more multipoint control units (MCUs) are purchased to serve the internal multipoint multimedia conferencing needs of these endpoints. The MCUs can be installed in one or more different company sites (e.g., at a particular company building, or within a city or region) to generally serve the multipoint needs of the endpoints local to that site. The result is that the various MCUs of the company may be distributed throughout a large region, such as throughout a country or throughout the globe.
As is known in the art, a multimedia endpoint is a terminal on a network. The multimedia endpoint is capable of providing real-time, two-way audiovisual communication with other terminals or an MCU. An endpoint provides speech only, speech and video, or speech, data and video. As is known in the art, an MCU is a conference control entity located in a node of the network or in a terminal. The MCU receives several media channels from access ports. According to certain criteria, the MCU processes audiovisual and data signals and distributes them to the connected channels. Examples of MCUs include the MGC-100, which is available from Polycom Inc. Additional information about the MGC-100 can be found at the website of www.polycom.com, which is incorporated herein by reference. A more thorough definition of an endpoint (terminal) and an MCU can be found in the International Telecommunication Union (“ITU”) standards such as but not limited to the H.320, H.324, and H.323 standards, which are incorporated herein by reference. (The ITU is the United Nations Specialized Agency in the field of telecommunications. Additional information regarding the ITU can be found at the website address of www.itu.int).
Several techniques have been used to improve the usage and the efficiency of multimedia multipoint communication systems. Some of these techniques improve the process of establishing a communication session by enabling reservation-less calls, ad-hoc calls, virtual meeting rooms, etc. Some of these techniques are disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 09/790,577, 10/954,934, and 10/960,337, which are each incorporated herein by reference.
Other techniques improve control of the multimedia multipoint communication network by offering a web server that monitors and controls one or more MCUs (a “Web-Commander” application). Exemplary techniques of web control are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,760,750, which is incorporated herein by reference. Additional techniques have been disclosed for utilizing the resources of one or more MCUs, for cascading one or more MCUs, and generally for improving resource usage of one or more MCUs. See, for example, U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 09/708,898 and 09/852,438; PCT international published patent applications W002/060126 and WO2005/004481; and U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0103468, which are each incorporated herein by reference.
However, none of these techniques offers a solution to a global corporation or a global service provider for improving the user experience; for simplifying the process of reserving and establishing a multipoint multimedia session between participants located in different sites or zones; or for improving or sharing the use of resources, thus saving communication expenses.
Therefore, there is a need for system and method for improving the usage of multimedia multipoint facilities of large corporations distributed over two or more sites.